Sigh. This is tiring, but I'll bite. You implied that the unemployed college grads could be working the H-1B workers' jobs. Heck, in this comment I'm replying to, you say:
> 1.7 million graduates should certainly be 1.7 million desirable employees (or at least 650k)
So, you did make such a statement. The sentiment that there is some overlap could be true to a small degree. But if you'll listen this time, I'll try to rephrase why the 1.7 million unemployed college grads might not be able to replace the 650k for the most part (or vice versa).
- Not having the right training. You seem to think a bachelor's degree is magic and if you have a BA in Political Science, you can be a Lawyer or a Chemist (or vice versa), simply because you're trainable and committed. I guess a person could be retrained to a different profession maybe (rare in reality), but that requires getting yet another degree. Who will pay for that?
- Not being good enough. Graduation standards are pretty low on average. I disagree about the grads being trainable, committed and following the rules part. Seriously, when I was talking about "top 30", I wasn't talking about H-1B workers, I was giving an exception to the trend I noticed where in most schools, merely graduating is the bare minimum. Which means that a college grad in the 1.7 million unemployed doesn't necessarily have skills.
- Not having homogenous demand across the country. The point with the NY-N. Dakota anecdote is that it's possible to have a shortage in one part of the country and too much in another. So what's the company in North Dakota to do? Immigrant workers tend to be okay with, well, immigrating. Most other workers aren't open to relocation, so they are tend to not fill those positions. So a position belonging to an H-1B in one of these places might not necessarily be able to be filled with a native.
Another way to think about this is consider how many orders of magnitude workers there are who are NOT immigrating to the US. By accepting immigrant workers, you're self-selecting people who are by definition more willing to move to places.
So the point is that it's not likely that these two groups of workers overlap very much.
If you want to rail on immigration, rail on the L-1. No wage minimums (to ensure undercutting locals), no skill or degree requirements, no quota, no requirement to have tried to hire a local, workers can't move to other companies. Some companies can apply for a blanket L-1 and they don't even need to file a new petition for each worker. The L-1 is legitimately everything you dislike about the H-1B.
Sigh. This is tiring, but I'll bite. You implied that the unemployed college grads could be working the H-1B workers' jobs. Heck, in this comment I'm replying to, you say:
> 1.7 million graduates should certainly be 1.7 million desirable employees (or at least 650k)
So, you did make such a statement. The sentiment that there is some overlap could be true to a small degree. But if you'll listen this time, I'll try to rephrase why the 1.7 million unemployed college grads might not be able to replace the 650k for the most part (or vice versa).
- Not having the right training. You seem to think a bachelor's degree is magic and if you have a BA in Political Science, you can be a Lawyer or a Chemist (or vice versa), simply because you're trainable and committed. I guess a person could be retrained to a different profession maybe (rare in reality), but that requires getting yet another degree. Who will pay for that?
- Not being good enough. Graduation standards are pretty low on average. I disagree about the grads being trainable, committed and following the rules part. Seriously, when I was talking about "top 30", I wasn't talking about H-1B workers, I was giving an exception to the trend I noticed where in most schools, merely graduating is the bare minimum. Which means that a college grad in the 1.7 million unemployed doesn't necessarily have skills.
- Not having homogenous demand across the country. The point with the NY-N. Dakota anecdote is that it's possible to have a shortage in one part of the country and too much in another. So what's the company in North Dakota to do? Immigrant workers tend to be okay with, well, immigrating. Most other workers aren't open to relocation, so they are tend to not fill those positions. So a position belonging to an H-1B in one of these places might not necessarily be able to be filled with a native.
Another way to think about this is consider how many orders of magnitude workers there are who are NOT immigrating to the US. By accepting immigrant workers, you're self-selecting people who are by definition more willing to move to places.
So the point is that it's not likely that these two groups of workers overlap very much.
If you want to rail on immigration, rail on the L-1. No wage minimums (to ensure undercutting locals), no skill or degree requirements, no quota, no requirement to have tried to hire a local, workers can't move to other companies. Some companies can apply for a blanket L-1 and they don't even need to file a new petition for each worker. The L-1 is legitimately everything you dislike about the H-1B.
Hope this helps.